FAITH, NOT SCIENCE:

"All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "That's a very shocking state of affairs."

This doesn't mean physicists aren't busy; the journals are publishing more research than ever. But Turok says all that research isn't doing much to advance our understanding of the universe -- at least not the way physicists did in the last century.

Physicists today "write a lot of papers, build a lot of [theoretical] models, hold a lot of conferences, cite each other -- you have all the trappings of science," he says. "But for me, physics is all about making successful predictions. And that's been lacking." [...]

The most celebrated ongoing experiments have failed to produce some long-anticipated discoveries.

Take the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the enormous particle accelerator built underground near Geneva, Switzerland. After it confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson, physicists hoped research at the LHC would quickly yield evidence of supersymmetry, a sort of supplement to the Standard Model that predicts an array of new, heavier particles that correspond to the known ones -- but no luck yet.

Ditto for the search for dark matter particles being conducted at facilities including the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota and the Gran Sasso lab in central Italy. No dark matter particles have yet been found.

And if string theory so far has resisted experimental verification, the so-called multiverse -- the idea that our universe is but one of many and perhaps an infinite number of universes -- seems to some scientists more like science fiction than a description of reality.

"What does it mean for something to exist if you can't observe it?" asks Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. "I think that's a discussion that belongs safely in the realm of philosophy," she adds. "People can believe in the multiverse all they want -- but it's not science."

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